A 24-year-old B.Sc student landed in police net for allegedly cheating innocent people by transferring money from their bank accounts to e-wallets. Police on Monday said they found transactions of about Rs 75 lakh through e-wallets were made by the accused.
Deputy Commissioner of Police (Southeast) Chinmoy Biswal said, “The main accused — Gaurav Sharma has been arrested. He along with his brother used to call up people, posing as bank officials.”
Police added the accused misled police investigators by claiming that he is a third year Medical BDS student at the Safdarjung Hospital.
Biswal said, “Keeping in mind the number of online fraud cases in the Southeast district was registering, we transferred them to the Cyber Cell of the district. In one of the cases, a woman reported at the lajpat Nagar Police Station that she got a call from a mobile number last month purportedly from corporate office of a bank in Mumbai following which she gave them the OTP number after which she got SMS about two transfers from her account of Rs 9,577 to PayZapp Wallet and Rs 9,999 to Mobile Wallet on the same day.
A team under Inspector Rajeev Kumar started working on the case. Based on digital profiling of the accused, police finally tracked down Gaurav to Sadarpur colony in Noida sector 45. On interrogation, Gaurav confessed to using the e-wallets to transfer the amounts.
Police also found 55 mobile SIM cards, 22 empty packets of mobile SIM cards, five mobile phones, two WiFi Routers, eight credit/debit cards, six passbooks of different bank accounts, 11 chequebooks of different banks, 11 empty mobile boxes and one Election Commission of India ID Card.
“During interrogation, Gaurav revealed that his younger brother Saurabh has gained expertise in getting the money transferred from the accounts of a person if they get his phone number and credit/debit card number. Gaurav also joined him in this activity. They employed illegal means to collect information of bank account holders through various sites and methods online. They also started to offer the jobs to unemployed youths to collect their identity documents which used to be used to obtain SIM cards in various names to call up the victims to cheat them,” said Biswal.
“In many cases, Gaurav succeeded in replacing the registered mobile number of the customer in the bank database with their own and generate OTP to E-Wallet and commit the transaction”, the DCP added.